Many large organizations have hundreds of thousands of employees with highly diversified skill sets and backgrounds. Harnessing a large stable of employee talent can present many challenges. For example, identifying internal employee talent and leadership potential is difficult even under the best of circumstances. Often employees have hidden talents which are not utilized to their full potential due to a misalignment with employees' job functions.
Employees are hired based on their past education, performance, and future potential, however if they are not given a job which can showcase their unique skills then the skills are displaced, become stale, or are essentially hidden away from view. Regular demands of the job require the employees to focus on the current job requirements and/or organizational goals and may not always provide a creative outlet.
Conventional talent identification methods rely on employee reviews or employee production metrics. Employee reviews can include biases of the reviewer that don't properly identify hidden talent. In addition, using conventional methods, talented introverts or creative thinkers that are misaligned with their job description can be routinely passed by and ignored during the employee review process. Employee production metrics may also fail in identifying potential top performers if those top performers are not currently engaged within their position.
One possible creative outlet mechanism is “serious” games. Serious games can encompass many forms and subject matters and teach players information relating to education, health, science, law and government, computers, and/or a multitude of other subjects. Typically, computer games are designed for entertainment purposes. However, with serious games, the goal is to train and educate players through a planned curriculum and set of objectives. Players can learn new material in a fun, educational environment.
Through the play of serious games, it can become apparent the relative strength and weaknesses of players of the game; however, identifying talent within the game can present challenges due to the sheer size and complexity of administering a game within large organizations.
The above-described deficiencies of conventional talent identification solutions are merely intended to provide an overview of some of the problems of conventional systems and techniques, and are not intended to be exhaustive. Other problems with conventional systems and techniques, and corresponding benefits of the various non-limiting embodiments described herein may become further apparent upon review of the following description.